The Amazon Phone is Here! Bezos Announces Fire Phone in Seattle

Jeff Bezos just took the wraps off of Amazon’s new smartphone, the Fire Phone. Amazon’s foray into the smartphone space rocks a 4.7 inch IPS LCD HD display, Gorilla glass 3, a quad-core 2.2GHz processor, Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB RAM. The Fire Phone packs 13MP rear-facing with f/2.0 lens and OIS and even includes little motors that will correct the camera lenses to counter act blurry pictures from hand trembles. The Fire Phone also rocks dual stereo speakers, and will ship with headphones which are designed to be tangle-free. The Fire Phone will include a feature called Dynamic Perspective, which changes the view of pictures as the device is moved. Users will also be able to tilt the phone to scroll through web pages, e-books and more.

As one would imagine, the Fire Phone will work across Amazon’s ecosystem and will include unlimited photo storage via Amazon Cloud Drive. Second screen and X-Ray features are included on the Fire Phone, and allows you to cast or fling content from the Fire Phone to a Miracast device. Amazon’s Prime Music will provide streaming music to Fire Phone owners, as well as compete access to Amazon’s Appstore. Akin to Amazon’s Kindle devices, the Fire Phone runs Android at the core with a heavily customized Amazon UI running the show. That means no Google Play Store which will make Android owners think twice about picking up Amazon’s smartphone.

While the Fire Phone certainly has an impressive spec sheet and looks like a decent device, it will be hard for Amazon to pull non-Amazon customers into their ecosystem. For those Kindle owners who have a plethora of content and apps purchased from Amazon, this could just be the smartphone for you.